{‘I delivered complete nonsense for four minutes’: Meera Syal, Larry Lamb and More on the Terror of Nerves
Derek Jacobi experienced a instance of it during a international run of Hamlet. Bill Nighy wrestled with it preceding The Vertical Hour opening on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has equated it to “a malady”. It has even caused some to take flight: Stephen Fry disappeared from Cell Mates, while Another performer exited the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve totally gone,” he stated – even if he did return to complete the show.
Stage fright can trigger the tremors but it can also cause a complete physical paralysis, to say nothing of a utter verbal loss – all directly under the lights. So for what reason does it take hold? Can it be overcome? And what does it seem like to be seized by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal recounts a typical anxiety dream: “I find myself in a costume I don’t know, in a role I can’t remember, facing audiences while I’m naked.” Decades of experience did not leave her immune in 2010, while staging a try-out of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Doing a solo performance for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the aspect that is going to cause stage fright. I was frankly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before opening night. I could see the open door opening onto the courtyard at the back and I thought, ‘If I ran away now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal gathered the courage to stay, then promptly forgot her words – but just continued through the confusion. “I faced the abyss and I thought, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the entire performance was her speaking with the audience. So I just walked around the stage and had a little think to myself until the lines returned. I winged it for a short while, uttering complete twaddle in persona.”
Larry Lamb has dealt with powerful anxiety over years of stage work. When he began as an beginner, long before Gavin and Stacey, he enjoyed the practice but being on stage induced fear. “The minute I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to become unclear. My legs would start trembling wildly.”
The performance anxiety didn’t ease when he became a professional. “It went on for about three decades, but I just got more adept at concealing it.” In 2001, he dried up as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the early performance at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my first speech, when Claudius is addressing the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got stuck in space. It got worse and worse. The full cast were up on the stage, watching me as I totally lost it.”
He got through that performance but the director recognised what had happened. “He realised I wasn’t in charge but only seeming I was. He said, ‘You’re not engaging with the audience. When the spotlights come down, you then shut them out.’”
The director kept the audience lighting on so Lamb would have to accept the audience’s attendance. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Slowly, it got better. Because we were staging the show for the majority of the year, gradually the stage fright vanished, until I was confident and openly interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the stamina for stage work but loves his performances, delivering his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept interfering of his persona. “You’re not giving the freedom – it’s too much you, not enough persona.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was cast in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-consciousness and uncertainty go opposite everything you’re trying to do – which is to be liberated, let go, completely lose yourself in the role. The question is, ‘Can I allow space in my head to allow the role in?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all playing the same woman in various phases of her life, she was delighted yet felt intimidated. “I’ve developed doing theatre. It was always my comfort zone. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel nerves.”
She recollects the night of the initial performance. “I truly didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the only occasion I’d felt like that.” She coped, but felt swamped in the initial opening scene. “We were all motionless, just talking into the blackness. We weren’t facing one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the lines that I’d rehearsed so many times, approaching me. I had the classic symptoms that I’d had in minor form before – but never to this level. The feeling of not being able to inhale fully, like your breath is being extracted with a void in your torso. There is nothing to hold on to.” It is worsened by the sensation of not wanting to disappoint other actors down: “I felt the obligation to all involved. I thought, ‘Can I get through this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart blames insecurity for inducing his nerves. A lower back condition prevented his dreams to be a soccer player, and he was working as a warehouse operator when a companion submitted to drama school on his behalf and he was accepted. “Appearing in front of people was totally alien to me, so at acting school I would go last every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was sheer relief – and was better than manual labor. I was going to do my best to conquer the fear.”
His debut acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were informed the play would be recorded for NT Live, he was “frightened”. A long time later, in the first preview of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his opening line. “I perceived my accent – with its pronounced Black Country accent – and {looked